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… I don’t yet know how to reconcile that, nor do I have a satisfactory alternative theory or criticism to offer.
Do #2140 and its children help as an alternative theory?
… I don’t yet know how to reconcile that, nor do I have a satisfactory alternative theory or criticism to offer.
You do know criticisms, see #2094.
We can criticize theories for lacking structure, resilience, depth, reach, etc. But again, if we want to avoid justificationism, theories that do have those attributes don’t get points for having them.
[L]abeling explanations as good or bad can itself be a form of positive argument.
Labeling them good, yes. But not labeling them bad.
You retain that freedom. Veritula has no power over you. Being irrational is your prerogative (as long as you don’t violate anyone else’s consent in the process). Just don’t pretend to yourself or others that you’re being rational when you’re not.
That would be a pending criticism.
Make a reasonable effort to make the criticism explicit so it can be brought into direct conflict with the parent idea and examined further. In the meantime, do consider it a pending criticism and don’t act on the parent idea. You can also submit a placeholder criticism saying something like ‘I have an inexplicit criticism of this idea.’
In the neo-Darwinian view, any replicator’s primary ‘concern’ is how to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals. This view is what Dawkins (IIRC) calls the gene’s eye view, and it applies to ideas as much as it does to genes. Any adaptation of any replicator is primarily in service of this concern.
So I think the answer to your question, “Are ideas also guesses of how to survive in the mind and across substrates …?”, is ‘yes’.
Well, if you were to open the letter anyway, and somebody criticized you for it, you could offer the following counter-criticisms: 1) you cannot be expected to adopt an idea while being prevented from entertaining it; 2) somebody artificially constructed a situation designed to abuse the literal content of the two rules in #2140 in order to violate their intention, which is to promote critical thinking and rationality; 3) just because ideas have no pending criticisms doesn’t mean you don’t get to question those ideas – otherwise no one could ever submit a first criticism.
What if I have an inexplicit criticism of the idea?
Yeah, thanks! Are ideas also guesses of how to survive in the mind and across substrates, or is there more to ideas?
Not necessarily. Maybe somebody just forgot to reply or doesn’t know what to say.
You’d know it’s a DDoS long before reviewing all the contents. That amount of criticism in a short time is suspicious, so you’d investigate for signs of coordination. Companies investigating actual DDoSes don’t need to review every single request to know they’re being DDoS’ed. And no otherwise reasonable person could blame them if a few good requests get dropped during their defense efforts.
Yeah. You wouldn’t even know that what the criticism is before reading it.
The premise sounds contrived because you couldn’t have only that one idea in isolation. You’d have to know about letters, and reading them, and criticisms, and so on.
Attack means bad faith, which is a type of counter-criticism.
But not everyone will always use the platform in an ideal way, and I don’t want to make it easier for issues to compound.
That limits the scope of the problem but doesn’t eliminate it. A single recipient could still react in a distracting way.
Revisions are complicated. Too many options (superseding a previous version, ‘Is criticism?’, unchecking comments). It might help to have a more guided processes over multiple screens.
The rival theories and clashes sound like competition between genes – or more precisely, between the theories those genes embody.
Basically, genes contain guesses (in a non-subjective sense) for how to spread through the population at the expense of their rivals. Those guesses are met with selection pressure and competition.
How could we integrate that vision with Popper's definition (paraphrased): a tension, inconsistency, or unmet explanatory demand that arises when a theory clashes with observations, background assumptions, or rival theories, thereby calling for conjectural solutions and critical tests.
A gene doesn’t have problems in any conscious sense, but it always faces the problem of how to spread through the population at the expense of its rivals.
Maybe that answers your question, Erik.